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The story of a local literary gem, lost and found

In an age when search engines and social networks give users everything they need to know – about the past, present and future – there is seemingly no such thing as a revelation any more.

But what of a forgotten novel, once an international bestseller, somehow missed by all the digital archives, about the very city in which you live, set more than a half century ago with vivid details about where we came from and the shape of things to come.

The Torontonians, set in the 1940s and `50s and originallypublished in 1960, is just such a discovery.

It was written by Phyllis Brett Young, a largely forgotten author who died in 1996, 11 years before her book was finally rescued and republished late last year.

It's difficult to decide what is more astonishing: The book's utter disappearance, along with the author, from the literary map; or its acute examination of subjects still central to the changes currently redefining Toronto some 50 years later.

The relevance to today is remarkable. Take, for example, the novel's disdain for the homogeneity of Toronto's nascent suburbs. Today, those same neighbourhoods – Rosedale, Forest Hill, Leaside – are wealthy, inner-city enclaves, and arguably just as homogeneous as the insular places Young skewered.

Five decades later, we see the same patterns Young uncovered in The Torontonians playing out in the Chinese enclaves of Markham and in the self-imposed isolation of South Asians in Brampton.

"I don't think my mother would have liked to see that," says Valerie Argue, Young's only child. "She wouldn't have wanted people to live with very little contact to others. My mother certainly was someone who appreciated a diversity of spirit."

That sentiment is supported by something Young told the Star in 1960, talking about the previous decade: "Toronto was basically British, with a lot of traditions – some good, some bad.

"Those who think they should all be kept, are simply lost in the pulsing metropolis of today. Those who want to throw out everything would sacrifice the flavour of a city which can retain graciousness and dignity in spite of the vitality of today's explosion."

That sort of acuity – neither reactionary nor radical – characterizes The Torontonians and probably saved it from permanent obscurity. When a McGill historian got her hands on a used copy last year, she saw the book's merit right away and was instrumental in its reissue. It's now making its way on to reading lists at a number of Canadian universities.

Given the decades of neglect, it's difficult to convey just what a literary star Young was in her time, but the evidence is in the archives.

For her effort in writing The Torontonians Young, who described herself as a housewife, was once compared to Robertson Davies and Hugh MacLennan. The Toronto Star's Robert Fulford, when the novel was just released, reported that local bookstores carrying it were experiencing "unusually large sales" and, based on its purchase by British publisher W.H. Allen, Fulford predicted a "much wider appeal."

The book was later published under the title Gift of Time in the U.S., prompting the The New York Times to proclaim: "In a growing catalogue of books that have been probing the sweet life of suburbia, Mrs. Young's stands out as both wise and witty."

In Europe, The Torontonians was also published as The Gift of Time. In Australia, where Young was described as "One of Canada's outstanding novelists," it was called The Commuters, a title that captured the physical and psychic dislocation of a growing "sub"-urban class.

Young began contemplating The Torontonians during a five-year stay in Geneva, where her husband worked for the United Nations. After returning to Ontario in the 1950s, the self-taught writer, first-generation Canadian daughter of English parents and wife of an international civil servant wanted desperately to rewrite her city's reputation as a dull colonial outpost.

In contrast with the "hogtown" jokes commonly told in North America, Young would treat Toronto as the "sophisticated, cosmopolitan city it is," complete with the struggles of any dynamic metropolis.

By 1960, the city was in the fever of a postwar boom and being stretched to new limits – geographically, economically, socially and architecturally (in that spirit, the book's original cover featured a sketch of Viljo Revell's winning design for a new city hall, five years before the building went up).

Canadians were beginning to define their own art and culture and the country's politicians began shaping a unique international identity as a soft power, one whose policies often played U.S. and European allies off of each other.

The Torontonians was the first internationally read novel that both chronicled and celebrated the city's demographic transition, a provincial British town opened by the arrival of Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Polish and other Europeans.

Hung on a narrative that details the lives of "Rowanwood" housewives (Young's alias for Leaside, which in the 1950s was the northern edge of Toronto) who occupy the affluent suburb above the city during the day – after husbands empty out on their morning commute downtown – the book operates on two interconnected levels.

The banality of the women's tedious lives, spent anticipating the perfect Chinese carpet to complete the home, "thick and soft, the clear translucent green of a tropical sea...the outward and visible proof of success," or struggling over just the right dress for an upcoming dinner party is a critique of the city's provincial past.

But while detailing what's marked those inner lives, the novel also cautions against an equally tedious and inauthentic future, defined by hyper-consumerism and massive urban sprawl in pursuit of the ideal "sub"-urban setting – that magical place between the inner city and the countryside where a perfectly manicured lawn and translucent Chinese carpet can signal ones arrival.

American-style consumerism is welcomed skeptically, as a possible antidote to the ingrained class structure that had until then defined one's social standing. But the following passage highlights Young's cynicism toward the artifice of such consumption and where it could lead:

"Tempted by newer and shinier gadgets, enticed by advertisers who knew only too well how to do their job, you took on more and more and more. Finally, run ragged by all the easier work you had undertaken, you had little or no time left for anything other than tending your machines."

The place Karen Whitney, the novel's central character, strives for is the same place she hopes her city will reach, somewhere between the past it has moved from and the future that seems to be unfolding.

Because of a coincidence in the early 1990s, we can see today's Toronto – a city still defined by its growing pains and still trying to prove its sophistication to the world – in the novel that first put the city on the international map.

"A friend found a copy in a used bookstore in Wolfville, Nova Scotia," explains Suzanne Morton, a McGill University history professor who says she had never heard of Young, but was instrumental in getting The Torontonians re-published.

Argue hopes the rissue will resurrect The Torontonians and her mother's forgotten reputation as one of Canada's best author's.

Young's disappearance was so complete that upon her death in 1996, the only mention of the author was a short death notice placed by her daughter.

It read, in part: "Phyllis Brett Young was a well-known Canadian novelist whose books have been enjoyed by readers in many different countries."

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